Dec172012

Washington—U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today released the following statement after the Senate confirmed Fernando Olguin to be a U.S. District Judge for the Central District of California:

“Mr. President, I rise to express my strong support for the nomination of Fernando Olguin, whom I recommended to President Obama to be a U.S. District Judge for the Central District of California after he earned a strong recommendation from my bipartisan judicial selection committee.

Born and raised in the Greater Los Angeles community of Azusa, Judge Olguin lives in the Los Angeles area today.

He is a graduate of Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

After serving for two years as a law clerk to a Federal District Court Judge in Arizona, Judge Olguin joined the U.S. Department of Justice through the Attorney General’s Honors Program.

From 1991 through 1994, Judge Olguin served as a Trial Attorney in the Civil Rights Division in Washington, DC, enforcing numerous Federal statutes, including the Fair Housing Act and the Public Accommodations Act.

He then joined the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, or MALDEF, serving as its National Education Program Director from 1994 to 1995 in Washington, DC.

Judge Olguin then came back to California, becoming a partner at the law firm Traber, Voorhees, and Olguin, where he practiced civil litigation from 1995 to 2001.

He was appointed to serve as a Magistrate Judge in 2001, where he has built a stellar record. In his 11 years on the bench, he has managed a docket of hundreds of cases at a time and issued hundreds of published opinions, as well as nearly 2,000 decisions and orders.

In 2011, he had the best record of any Magistrate Judge on the Court at working with litigants to settle their disputes. This is very important in a busy district like the Central District, whose judges carry the seventh-highest civil caseload in the Nation.

Judge Olguin is well-respected in the L.A. community, and he is supported by the law enforcement community including L.A.P.D. Chief Charlie Beck, L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca, and the Los Angeles Police Protective League.

In short, Judge Olguin is well-qualified, seasoned, and fair. I am very proud to support him, and I urge my colleagues to support him as well.

I also want to urge the confirmations of other judicial nominees from my home state, many of which have been pending on the Executive Calendar for months.

Including Judge Olguin, four of the 13 District Court nominees on the Executive Calendar are from California. The other nominees are:

Superior Court Judge Jon Tigar and Bill Orrick, nominees to the Northern District recommended by Senator Boxer; and

Superior Court Judge Troy Nunley, a nominee to the Eastern District whom I recommended to the President.

All three were approved by bipartisan votes in the Judiciary Committee, two of them by voice vote.

Each of these districts is in a judicial emergency according to the Judicial Conference of the United States.

The Northern District’s caseload is over twenty percent above the national average. It now takes over 50 percent longer for a case to go to trial than it did a year ago in the Northern District, which hears some of our country’s most complex technology cases.

The Eastern District is the most overworked district in the Nation by far. With over 1,100 weighted filings per judgeship, its caseload is over twice the national average.

With this extreme crisis, I especially urge my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to allow Judge Troy Nunley to be confirmed this year.

Judge Nunley essentially was a career prosecutor and State Department of Justice lawyer before joining the state bench over 10 years ago. He is highly qualified and experienced. He also earned unanimous support in the Judiciary Committee, so he is uncontroversial.

I am very pleased we recently confirmed Jesus Bernal to the Central District, and I urge my colleagues to support Judge Olguin as well.

My state—more than any other—urgently needs us to take prompt action on judicial nominees. I am pleased with the progress we have made in the lame duck, and I very much hope the three other California nominees who remain on the Calendar will be confirmed.”